Joseph Ratzinger saw the Second Vatican Council as destiny.
As
theological advisor to Cardinal Frings, Joseph Ratzinger experienced
first-hand the breathtaking pace at which initiatives, work sessions,
brainstorming and document preparation took place in the four sessions
of that great adventure, during which he worked closely with prominent
bishops and theologians of the 20th century, from Congar to Rahner, from
Frings to Volk, from De Lubak to Danièlou.
As Prefect of the former
Holy Office, he played a major part in shaping the Catechism of the
Catholic Church that was published in 1992, systematically presenting
the depositum fidei in light of the Second Vatican Council.
As Pope he
tried to heal the schism with Lefebvrian traditionalists, which led to
him being accused of opening up to the “’anti-conciliar’ Church”.
Once
Ratzinger, a keen advocate of conciliar reform, became the Successor of
Peter, he also defended an appropriate “hermeneutics” of Vatican II,
stressing that the reform did not change the Church’s genetics in any
way.
But the central focus which Joseph Ratzinger gave Vatican II in his
work became something of an enigma that had to be decoded. Many over
the years have strived to scrutinise the “coherence” of Ratzinger’s
approach, possibly seeking to make an embarrassing revelation about a
change of sides that could demonstrate that he became an informer late
in the day.
On the opposite front, there have been those who have
insinuated a “modernist” tendency that remained alive like burning
embers beneath the troubled moves that were made when he was the
guardian of Catholic orthodoxy.
The first volume of Joseph Ratzinger’s
writings at and on Vatican II has now been published in Italy, by the
Vatican Publishing House. The 7th volume of Ratzinger’s Opera Omnia
without footnotes, allows the reader to feel the intensity with which
the Council and its consequences were experienced - 726 pages of
suggestions for today’s Church.
What makes Joseph Ratzinger’s texts so comfortingly current is the
underlying links between the intuitions and enthusiasm of the then young
theology professor and the sensus Ecclesiae of the octogenarian Pope
Francis. The freshness and current relevance of the content come from
what Ratzinger already pointed to as the genuine source of conciliar
reform. The same source feeds the “pastoral conversion” advocated by the
Successor of Peter today and is still met with resistance and organised
sabotage attempts.
In one of the passages of the recently published texts on the
Council, Ratzinger captures and describes the reality of the Council in a
clear and very current way. The dynamics he outlined then are very
similar to the dynamics that shape today’s Church. His intuition shines
again in his description of the third conciliar phase, in the pages he
devotes to the “previous explanatory note”, the text signed by Cardinal
Pericle Felici, which explains the criteria for interpreting the
passages on episcopal collegiality contained in the Apostolic
Constitution Lumen Gentium: the ones the conciliar minority incessantly
contested, pointing to them as a factor that could potentially weaken
papal authority.
The way Ratzinger sees it, the previous Note – which he did not
appreciate at all – had led to the emergence, between the lines, of two
fundamental options at loggerheads in the Council: on the one hand there
was one school of thought that takes the vastness of the Christian
Tradition as the starting point and seeks to describe the constant
breadth of ecclesial possibilities based on this. On the other hand, we
find a purely systematic school of thought, which only admits the
current legal form of the Church as a criterion for its reflections and
therefore necessarily fears that any action that strays from this will
lead nowhere.
Ratzinger holds that the “conservatism” of the second option was
rooted “in its detachment from history and therefore in an underlying
“lack” of Tradition, in other words openness towards Christian history
as a whole”. Already then, Ratzinger’s factual description overturned
the pre-packaged framework, which the Council was describing in its
meetings as a conflict between “conservatives” who were concerned about
potential “deviations” from Tradition and “progressivists” who were
driven by modernist impulses. The exact opposite was the truth,
Ratzinger explained. “It was those who were labelled “progressivists” or
at least “most of them”, who were striving to achieve a “return to the
breadth and richness of what had been passed down”. They saw the source
of the renewal they sought, in the “intrinsic broad-mindedness of the
Church”.
It is still the case today that those who uphold the doctrine and
Tradition of the Catholic Church in a grossly exaggerated way, are the
very ones who stand in the way of the Church proceeding in the
simplicity of Tradition. The leitmotif in all of Ratzinger’s
contributions and interventions in the vast work done by the Council, is
the desire to return to the original source in order to make the most
of the entire “breadth and richness of everything that was passed down”:
from his writings on the Divine Revelation to those regarding the
mission, from his critical comments on the “optimistic” undertones of
the Gaudium et Spes Constitution on the Church today to his incredibly
profound reflections on the “crucial battle” over episcopal collegiality
in the Church, all of which aim to attest and document the fact that
the doctrine of collegiality is not theological neophilia but is part of
Tradition.
In response to those who claimed that the terms College and
collegiality are not found in the Gospel, Ratzinger, together with his
theologian colleagues Karl Rahner and Gustave Martelet pointed out that
the same could be said about the terms “Primate” and “Infallibility”.
“Tradition and the magisterium,” the future Pope Benedict wrote at the
time, “must always develop the seed contained in the Scripture”.
Because
the Church, Christ’s Bride, is not a self-sufficient holy entity that
exists outside time and space and must be defended at all costs from any
kind of criticism. It recognises itself as a reality that remains
dependant on Christ’s active grace as it journeys through history,
“constantly in need of renewal,” “characterised by weakness and sin” and
therefore “always in need of the tenderness of a forgiving God”.